87 on OpenCritic. If I’m being honest, that’s quite a bit higher than I was expecting after playing the demo. The gameplay felt novel for about three fights before it quickly started to feel like extruded third-person shooter product.

Unless I start hearing really strong things about the story, I’ll probably be waiting for a sale.

I have never understood this. Heard it with Undertale, too. One can always just ignore the weirdos in the fanbase?

I got absolutely sucked into Mewgenics the past month, still playing that. It doesn’t help that no other recent releases have caught my eye, and there aren’t really any on the horizon other than Mina the Hollower, which still doesn’t even have a release date.

Had a really good week doing my new grammar drills. Already feeling a shift in comprehension now that I’m starting this verb-first approach. If nothing else, I’m seeing the nuts and bolts of Japanese more, and the reasons why I’m getting the cues I’m getting that point towards specific understanding. Still definitely on track to start the new book in two weeks.

On a more negative side, N2 vocab is kicking my ass a bit. Starting to see my mature card retention rate tick down and I know exactly why: kanji kun’yomi. There are a lot more single-kanji verbs showing up than there used to be, and unfortunately, the readings for those kanji are all rote memorization. There are no shortcuts unless I stumble upon a mnemonic, and Zipf’s Law means words at this level are going to be relatively rare encounters when reading. One of the biggest challenges of upper intermediate/advanced learning across languages, I’m sure.

Nice, best gaming news so far this year for me. I played the crap out of the original.

Woo, that song in the trailer is filthy, but I sure hope the text-to-speech is something you can turn off.

おめでとう！

Hope you share your thoughts this summer on Quartet. I’m having mild regret at having done Tobira instead, hah.

I’m back to it today after a (mostly) week off. All I did was old flashcards.

Starting an interstitial review plan before starting my JLPT N2 prep in earnest at the end of the month. Was a little concerned at first because my analysis suggested some foundational issues (particles and sentence parsing mostly), but today’s session went really well. I think I’m showing good instincts.

Most interesting thing from today: I’m noticing impatience when starting comprehension in my head. You know how Japanese to English interpreters always take quite a while to start speaking? I really do need to build that memory-holding skill of topic, main verb first, be patient with it. My comprehension will get better and more efficient when I do.

It’s really cool to have gone from piecemeal vocab and grammar parsing, conjugations and particles and all that, to starting to see this bigger picture stuff.

Bit of a tough sell to shareholders when Death Stranding sold well north of 10 million copies.

I heard the lead guy for HuniePop say the same not very long ago. He said the turnaround time for games made in regions with looser IP laws could be insane at times, and before you know it, your preview assets show up in some product.

Still works in Reddit Sync (with the Revanced hack).

I hear that. I’m now 60 eps into Shun’s podcast and am definitely finding my focus getting sharper with it. I think a big part of it was breaking my passive listening habit in general; I realized I would throw on a MtG podcast in the shower or in the car and mostly tune it out. Side benefit: I’ve started doing more active listening to an audiobook in the car instead now.

Let me know if you find any good content!

Yeah, substantially higher production quality than I was expecting out of the visuals.

That said…I hope this is an early pass at the writing and voice acting for the purposes of a trailer. Rogue Trader was a lot better than this in both regards.

Cinematic style as in it’s heavy on cutscenes, or that you didn’t like the art direction? If it’s the former, that’s been the general orientation of the genre for a little while now.

You could try something more gameplay-oriented, like Octopath Traveler, Shin Megami Tensei V, or Rune Factory.

SQEX already tried that, and just like here, also with third-rate producers in a new tech space.

It really didn’t take him long to spend what little goodwill he got for punching Apple in the mouth.

I’m interested in the premise, but if it’s a 300 hour grind to Vox and Nagafen solo, it’s not gonna be for me. When I started (late Kunark), much of the old world was already dead, so it’d be neat to see that content.

Owlcat is a big RPG developer. Closer to Larian in terms of headcount. $1.4m is a drop in the bucket.

The concerns here would be about the different type of project and Owlcat’s history of releasing unpolished games at 1.0, not in it being a soulless cash grab.

I actually did a post-mortem today on it, and my self-evaluation is that my reading automaticity (that is, kanji/kana, familiar word processing speed) has significantly improved and I’m much more comfortable with complex sentences than I used to be. I also picked up a lot of new grammar. My vocab and kanji knowledge remain strong for my level.

The downside is, after doing an analysis on my notes about where I was getting tripped up, I have some foundational issues with comprehension and rules of grammar that need shoring up, things the book didn’t address. I think I’m going to do just that next month and push the next guidebook (a test prep book) to May.

Slow week, for a lot of reasons. Stayed on top of my flashcards but only spent maybe two hours on other materials. I’m starting to have thoughts about the textbook I’ve been using and how it kinda fell flat during the back stretch. The good news is it’s almost over, hah. Taking a short break right now before I read the very last page before the glossary. Then it’s onto the exercises and after that, I’m done! To the next study plan.

Will probably make a post on my intermediate learning journey in the near-ish future, would love to hear some thoughts about what works, what doesn’t for people. It’s a notorious problem in Japanese that filters a lot of students, and I’m sure it has parallels in other languages too.